by Mary Rickert
The girls are at the perfect age and of the perfect temperament to appreciate the celebration. Nan wonders if this is the last time they will do so. Oh, she is melancholy tonight, but this is Bay’s fifteenth birthday, so who knows? Thinking of her own abandoned friendships, Nan drinks the wine that only she seems to appreciate.
“You don’t have to eat those,” Bay says.
Thalia has been shoving beets around her plate like a dreaded homework assignment. Nan smiles kindly, meaning to reassure the girl that of course she doesn’t have to eat them if she doesn’t want to, at which point Thalia spears a large slice of beet with her fork, opens her mouth wide, and chomps quite vigorously, staring at Nan as if challenging her to a beet-eating duel. Instead, Nan cuts the cake without ceremony, placing large slices on pink crystal plates.
“When do we light the birthday candles and sing?” Thalia asks.
“Not until dark,” Bay says. “Outside.”
“It’s supposed to rain.”
Nan knows this is true, but both she and Thalia turn to Bay, who shakes her head and says it’s not going to, so Nan sees no reason to change their plans.
While they eat the chocolate cake, Nan notices that what little wine the girls had has blossomed blotched roses onto their cheeks. She thinks her own face must be aflame, for she has not refilled either girl’s glass, yet the bottle is almost empty, and besides, she feels light now, as if suspended above the room, escaped from the cage of her old body.
“Nana? Are you all right?”
Nan opens her mouth, prepared to say something important about friendships and time; instead, she burps. This prompts such a horrified expression from Bay that Nan can’t help but giggle, putting a damper on the lovely evening. Bay announces, with a distant, slightly disgusted tone, that she and Thalia are going into the parlor to watch movies. For some reason, Nan finds this funny. She pretends to concentrate on her plate as the girls pass, glancing up just long enough to note the studied way Bay ignores her and the soft smile Thalia graces her with, which Nan appreciates. Once the girls leave, Nan’s humor subsides. She sits at the table, trying not to remember her eighteenth birthday. When her mother sliced the cake, red velvet and Nan’s favorite, she could only think of blood.
Nan stands to clear the dishes, and the room wavers. She has had too much to drink, yet how lovely it is to feel released from the ache of bones and body. The table is half-cleared when the girls come out to help. They don’t need to, it’s Bay’s birthday, but they work while chatting happily about the vampire movie they’re watching.
After the dishes are done, Bay kisses Nan on the cheek and thanks her for a wonderful dinner. The girls go back to their movie. Nan sits on a rocker on the front porch, waiting for the dark, which comes so suddenly; she must have fallen asleep during its arrival. She is confused, trying to remember where she is and why, thinking she is the birthday girl, before recollecting. That’s when she notices the smell, the overwhelming scent of honeysuckle. “Eve?” she says, but there is no answer.
Nan shakes her head, rousing herself to place the tea lights in a circle of flat rocks in the backyard, fifteen of them, just the beginning of the spiral of life. When Nan tells the girls it is time, they appear near sleep, their eyes half-closed, their cheeks bright, but they quickly rally, in the way of the young.
It is a starry night, surprisingly cool for July. Bay lights the candles while Nan and Thalia sing. The three of them sit watching the flames in silence until Nan decides to go back to the house. “You girls stay out here as long as you like. Just don’t leave the yard.” Raised on terrible, true tales of kidnapped children, the girls agree.
Nan would like nothing better than to crawl into her narrow bed, but instead she pulls the chair, with its uneven cushion of tossed clothes, to the window overlooking the front of the house.
It was a nice birthday, wasn’t it? She thinks it was. Bay seems happy, yet Nan cannot shake the feeling that creeps over her, of trouble coming. She peers into the dark until her eyes burn, determined to stay focused, though she knows better than to think all danger can be seen.
***
Bay and Thalia have been best friends since kindergarten, when they were paired up as line buddies, standing shoulder to shoulder every time the class went anywhere: to lunch, recess, the library, field trips to the cheese factory and the post office. Over the years, they’ve both changed; Bay is taller than Thalia now, and Thalia can draw anything, a talent Bay does not possess. One thing that has remained constant through all the years is Thalia’s ability to keep the conversation going. Hours may pass, sometimes entire days, especially when she is so busy during the school year, but Thalia always resumes their conversation as though they had only been briefly interrupted.
“So, where were we,” Thalia says. “Oh, that’s right, vampire or werewolf? You know they make it look like one is the obvious choice, but when you really think about it, a vampire is always a vampire, and a werewolf is only horrible when there’s a full moon. So…”
Much later, after measuring the benefits of a real boy against a fantastic one, the tea lights burned low, they agree they are tired. Thalia says they should blow out the candles before they go inside. “We don’t blow them out,” Bay says. “That would be like blowing out the years of my life.” Thalia opens her mouth to say something but instead drapes her arm over Bay’s shoulder as they walk up the grassy slope.
After Thalia falls asleep, Bay lies in the dark, thinking about the day. She doesn’t know anyone who celebrates birthdays the way they do. Even in the middle of winter, they set tea lights in snow for her Nana’s birthday, making an impressive spiral of fire that Bay likes to watch from the warm kitchen. She rolls to her side, rearranges her pillow. It would be nice to fall asleep the way Thalia does, in midsentence, but Bay has never been an easy sleeper. It was a nice birthday, a really nice party, but she can’t shake the feeling of dissatisfaction that settles over her.
Bay’s whole life she’s felt like there’s a deep secret she hasn’t been told. Years ago, she tried to talk to her Nana about it, but she acted so distressed, spooning heaping teaspoons of cinnamon into her yogurt as though she were having some kind of a fit, saying over and over again, “Whatever could you mean? I never hid that you’re adopted,” Bay hasn’t brought it up since.
She rolls to her back and stares up at the ceiling. Maybe that’s all it is, she thinks. Maybe the feeling she gets, that there is some great secret to her life, is just because she has never met her birth mother. “Are you thinking about me tonight?” Bay whispers into the dark, then clenches her lips. She is fifteen now. She needs to get over this terrible habit she has of talking to herself. If there is some secret to her life, other than being adopted, well, “it’s time to know.”
“Time,” Thalia mumbles. “Time for what?”
“Nothing. You’re dreaming,” Bay says, wincing at the words.
It’s the sort of thing her Nana says when Bay wakes up in the middle of the night. Thinking of Nan’s short figure in the dark, her shadow face framed by the silver glow of hair hanging down, makes Bay sad. It’s not that she wants anyone else for a mother; she just wants to know where she came from.
But no, that’s not really it either. Bay is suddenly wide awake and filled with the need to look out her window. She moves carefully, she doesn’t want to wake Thalia, but the squeaky floorboards are impossible to avoid. Thalia mumbles in her sleep and rolls to her side. Bay stands very still, like when they were kids and used to play statue at school, one of the few games she was good at.
When Thalia’s breathing returns to the deep rhythm of slumber, Bay leans close to the open window, inhaling the fresh scent of summer, looking at her small circle of candles below. Thinking of her Nana’s impressive spiral of light each December, Bay presses her fingers against the windowsill to lean closer.
It isn’t that I want to know where I come from,
she thinks, but that I want to know where I’m going.
That’s her wish. She makes it over her candles, even though she’s never made a birthday wish before.
“We don’t do that sort of thing,” her Nana said, years ago, when Bay came home from school, asking about it.
Well, who knows, Bay thinks, sending her wish into each flickering flame. Maybe I do. Maybe I make wishes on birthdays, and maybe next year I’ll blow out my candles, and maybe I’ll be here, and maybe I won’t.
“What are you doing?” Thalia mumbles. “It’s the middle of the night.”
Bay opens her mouth to tell Thalia she’s dreaming again but instead runs lightly across the floor to kneel on the bed and whisper into the dark, talking about everything she’s just realized, until she is interrupted by Thalia’s soft snoring. Maybe I’ll move away, Bay thinks. Not like a runaway; I’ll find a job at a camp somewhere. Her Nana has mentioned how she had a job like that when she was eighteen. Of course Bay is only fifteen and summer is almost over, but who knows—there must be camps during the school year, and fifteen isn’t that young. Bay suspects she has been babied all her life; it is time she asserts herself. She can’t believe how excited she feels. Maybe I’m someone who can stay up all night, she thinks. Maybe I’m a night person. And that’s the last thing she remembers thinking when she wakes up early the next day and wonders if maybe she is a morning person, after all.
LAVENDER Associated with love and fertility, lavender works as a protection against evil and is thought to help bridge the gap to the spirit world. The sweet scent of lavender is conducive to a long life.
On the night of Bay’s fifteenth birthday, Nan falls asleep in the chair in front of the window—a disturbed, achy sleep from which she wakes at dawn, shivering in the damp air, to the sound of morning birds, with a headache. I have let this drag on far too long, she thinks as she crawls into bed. Bay is fifteen now. Fifteen! It is time Nan tell her everything. Well, not everything, of course, only the pertinent information. Hopefully, it isn’t too late. Yes, today is the day, Nan decides, which does nothing to soothe her headache. She finally falls asleep, but it is a fitful slumber from which she is thoroughly awoken when Nicholas jumps on her chest and mews.
Though it is July, Nan cannot shake the ache from her bones, or the terrible feeling that accompanies it; as if she’d spent the night walking too far, or doing calisthenics, as though she were no longer a person with a body, but a spirit trapped in one. She tries all morning to cast off the disturbed state, even as Bay and Thalia pick lavender flowers from their stalks for the homemade soap.
When the sound of the honking horn signals Mrs. Desarti’s arrival, Nan wipes her hands on her apron as she follows the girls outside. She briefly considers not letting Bay go to the river, but that would only cause a big upset. Besides, Nan needs time to prepare herself, and there is the matter of the soap to attend to as well. Bay leans out the window, waving wildly as Mrs. Desarti taps the horn in quick salute.
Once she is sure they are gone and not returning for some forgotten item, Nan takes the bowl of carefully harvested lavender outside, sprinkling it around the house, tossing the leftover into the forest. She picks up the spent tea lights, clutching all fifteen discs against her stomach, hurrying inside to fill them with water. She looks about the sunny kitchen at the remnants of the lavender shucking, bits of purple everywhere like confetti. She decides not to sweep up. It looks so pretty on the floor, the counter and table.
Reminding herself to stay focused, Nan goes upstairs to her bedroom, to the small closet there, shoving coats and dresses aside as she pushes to the back, too hot and close. Like a casket, she thinks, immediately scolding herself for her morbidity. She removes the pile of old sweaters and quilts from the box they hide, which she opens, immediately flooded by the scent of lavender.
Nan pulls out a large block of soap wrapped in brown paper, closes the lid, piles the sweaters and quilts, careful to cover the box entirely, nearly tripping over Nicholas as she backs out. She apologizes to the cat, who responds by commencing with a tongue bath.
When Nan returns to the kitchen, she is as exhausted as the time she really did make soap all those years ago, which, for some reason, Bay latched on to as one of her favorite traditions. Though today is the day for telling Bay almost everything, it certainly doesn’t have to include this transgression. The whole soapmaking business is minor and does not require a confession. Nan searches through the cleaning supplies in the basket under the sink (a place Bay never explores) for the blue bottle, which she spritzes about the room, then checks the stove-top clock (Nan has no tolerance at all for large clocks hanging on walls, with their constant reminder of time passing) and sees that it is late enough for a glass of wine, though truth be told, it always is.
She is shuffling toward the kitchen table when the phone rings, startling her with its loud trill; she yelps, clutching glass and bottle while she considers not answering, but the unsettled feeling she’s had of trouble coming decides her. She sets the wine and glass down and hurries to the small, crowded computer table where the phone sits.
“Hello?”
“Nan? Nan Singer? This is Sheriff Henry.”
“What is it? What’s happened?”
“I wonder if this is a good time to—”
“Is Bay all right? Tell me.”
“Oh, this isn’t that kind of call.”
“Well, what kind of call is it?”
“A warning? I was just going to stop by but—”
Nan finds that she has pulled the receiver off her ear and is staring at it as though it just stung her. She can’t think. She has to think.
“Mz. Singer?”
“No,” Nan says. She clicks the phone off and listens to the dead silence until the dial tone finally buzzes, sounding dreadfully loud.
When the phone rings again, Nan doesn’t answer, of course. She pours a glass of merlot from the previously uncorked bottle, surprised and irritated to discover only enough left for a single glass. Could Bay be drinking? On top of everything, is there also this?
Nan gulps the wine the way she used to gulp the cherry cough medicine her mother foisted on her when she was a kid, though actually the wine is quite good. Time’s up, she thinks. Hasn’t she been tired for so long? Tired of all these secrets? Just plain tired? She sets the empty glass on the table and closes her eyes, waking at the sound of the screen door slamming shut. Before Nan can even open her mouth, Bay says, with an unmistakable quiver in her voice, “It smells great in here! Why do I always miss the soapmaking?”
Tell her, Nan thinks. Just get it over with. Tell her what you did and tell her what you are and what she is and be done with it. “Oh, it’s just a big mess. You’re here for the best part.”
“Well, next time”—Bay’s voice sounds as tremulous as water—“I want to be here for the actual soapmaking.”
“Did you have a good time at the river, dear?”
“Oh, yes,” Bay says, though Nan smells the lie. “Something funny happened though.”
“Funny?”
“Not funny. Weird. Nothing. But Mrs. Desarti made me promise to tell you. She’s going to call later.”
Nan keeps her voice level. “What happened?”
“Nothing bad.”
Is it the unusual darkness of Bay’s damp hair that makes her countenance so ghostly?
“Don’t be mad, okay?”
“Why would I be angry? Is Thalia all right?”
Bay nods.
“Mrs. Desarti?”
“She’s going to call you.”
Nan starts to speak, but Bay, flitting about the kitchen like a moth at a light, continues. “It’s just stupid. One minute I was underwater, and the next it felt like someone was pulling me by the ankles. Duckweed, that’s what Mrs. Desarti said it was. Anyway, the next thing I know, this guy from school is pulling me, rea
lly hard. He even had to go up for air a few times before he got me out. Nana, are you all right?”
“Who? Who did this?”
Bay sighs. “His name is Wade. He’s in my class.”
It does not escape Nan’s attention how Bay blushes as though the boy’s name alone is enough to make her bloom in a way Nan finds most alarming. “Well, that certainly was very nice of him, but I’m sure you would have been fine.”
“I was not fine, Nana! I was drowning, and he…he…”
“You were never in danger.”
Bay, leaning against the counter, shrugs in that maddening way she has, with just one shoulder, staring at the floor as though she had something to be ashamed of.
“Bay, did something else happen? Is there more?”
“Everyone was there. Everyone from school. Everyone!”
Nan sighs. She picks up the wine bottle and turns it over her glass, hoping to discover an unharvested drop; she waits, apparently longer than she should, for suddenly Bay stamps her foot. It is a small stamp, not like the great foot stomping of her grade school years; its return almost makes Nan smile.
“You don’t understand, Nana. I’m not going back there. I can never see those people again!”
Nan sets the bottle gently on the table. She concentrates on the brightly painted chicken salt and pepper shakers. They were on the table the night of her eighteenth birthday, when she had to pretend everything was normal, though nothing was, and they were on this very table when she had that trouble after Bay’s arrival; they are here now, years later. Who would have guessed that the constant watcher at every worst event, the icon of her life, would be these silly chickens? Tell her, Nan thinks. She takes a deep breath and inhales the near scent of wine, the perfume of lavender, the mineral odor of water.
“Well, to begin with,” Nan says, “you were never in danger.”
Bay lifts her head to glare with wide eyes, her jaw slack. Nan has seen this look before, this teenage look, and she does not enjoy it.